You Will Shoot Your Eye Out

“Why didn’t the cops shoot her in the leg? Or shoot the knives out of her hand? Why did they have to kill her?”

Whenever a widely publicized police shooting takes place, the internet is instantly alive with armchair experts who want you to know how poorly the involved officers handled it and how easily the situation could have been resolved if only the officers had followed the recommendations the armchair expert has arrived at after watching the video at least twenty times. My old friend, the charming and talented writer Amy Alkon, refers to these people as those who got their Ph.D.s in policing at “Starsky and Hutch University.”

The latest eruption of faux expertise comes in the wake of Monday’s NYPD shooting of Pamela Cisneros, 49, who had just stabbed two people in Times Square, one of them fatally. “[The shooting was] legally justified and the cop probably won’t even get docked vacation days,” wrote one keyboard tactics expert, “but there were multiple officers, they could have disarmed her with a few scratches at worst from those tiny little blades. Why didn’t one circle behind her? They could have kept her contained, talked her down. Legally justified, morally cowardly and reprehensible.”

Where to start with this?

First of all, those “tiny little blades” had already been stained with the blood of two victims, one of whom, a young mother, died as a result.

One might envision a scenario in which the officers disarmed Cisneros while suffering only “a few scratches,” but no police officer is legally or morally obligated to risk death or dismemberment so as to satisfy the utopian visions of people offering their critiques from the safety of their homes.

As set forth by the U.S. Supreme Court in the landmark case of Graham v. Connor (1989), and reaffirmed many times since then, the test of any use of force by the police is whether the officer’s actions were “objectively reasonable” under the circumstances.

The Court further ruled that “[t]he ‘reasonableness’ of a particular use of force must be judged from the perspective of a reasonable officer on the scene, rather than with the 20/20 vision of hindsight,” and that “[t]he calculus of reasonableness must embody allowance for the fact that police officers are often forced to make split-second judgments—in circumstances that are tense, uncertain, and rapidly evolving—about the amount of force that is necessary in a particular situationAlso

Read: Willful Blindness at the Los Angeles Times

So consider those officers on duty Monday in Times Square. Most of them appeared to be assigned to foot posts intended to deter crime and protect the tourist trade on which the area depends. Their days are for the most part spent giving directions to and posing for pictures with tourists and occasionally dealing with petty crimes. Suddenly they are confronted by a woman wielding two knives that only moments earlier she had used to stab two random passersby. Keep in mind that the body armor an officer wears offers little protection against a knife attack, even assuming the assailant stabs the officer in the chest or back and not in the head or neck. A few scratches? Think again.

And unlike a situation involving a barricaded suspect, which allows police ample time to formulate a plan and assemble the necessary personnel and weapons, those officers faced a situation that was the very definition of “tense, uncertain, and rapidly evolving.” Yes, a beanbag shotgun or 40mm launcher would have been valuable in confronting Cisneros, but officers on foot posts have no access to such weapons. (Two officers in a squad car can be seen arriving just before Cisneros is shot, but we don’t know if they had any type of less-lethal munitions.)

As Cisneros began advancing toward the officers, two of them discharged Tasers at her, but with no apparent effect (as is often the case). In short, the officers were out of options. Two of them fired a total of three rounds at Cisneros, killing her.

Yes, an unfortunate outcome, but less for the death of Cisneros than that of the woman she killed. Cisneros was one of the thousands of dangerous mentally ill people allowed to roam the streets of America despite having exhibited behavior that in an earlier time would have resulted in their being confined to some type of facility. If you live or work in a big city you see them every day, and every week there are news stories telling of how one of them has assaulted or killed someone.

So to the Keyboard Kops out there, you’re entitled to your opinions, but the rest of us can be thankful you don’t make the rules.